PLUG-INs A Student’s Guide to Information Literacy

IN-TEXT CITATIONS for Paraphrases

APA Style

What is an in-text citation?

What are paraphrases

?

What is APA

style ?

Why are ladybugs in this presentation?

Why not ?

They are cute and useful insects.

APA means American

Psychological Association, a professional

organization.

It identifies the source of information in the body of your

writing.

What is an in-text

citation?

For paraphrasing remember :

Same meaning but different

words.

For example, There are 2 and

a quarter million people

in Dubai. Change to: Dubai has a

population of 2.25 million.

You do not need quotation marks for words which are not direct quotations (for example

paraphrases or summaries). But you need to note the source of the

information.

Do it like this : (Author, year)

You put it in the body of your writing, not at the bottom of a page

or at the end.

Open parenthesi

s mark

Year source

publishedAuthor’s last name only

Closed parenthesis

mark

Comma, space

(Author, year)

Page numbers are not noted in APA for paraphrases.

Here is what it looks like.

Blah da dee da da da Dubai is the most

interesting city in the world (Smith,

2005). Blah da dee da da da.

If the citation is at the end of a sentence,

put a full stop outside the parenthesis

mark.

What about just a number from a table, graph

or chart ?

For example, you see a table

that says 4 ½ million

ladybugs live in the UAE.

Country PopulationLadybugs

UAE 4.5 millionOman 3.2 millionQatar 1 million

Did you count the 4 ½ million yourself ? No !

You read it.

Write it the same way but add the page number :

(Smith, 2005, p. 4)

So, you must note the

source of your information.

The complete citation (full author name, year, title, city, publisher, & pages) must be in the

Bibliography or Reference List at the end of your paper.

If the author’s name appears as part of your

text, write only the year in parentheses after the author’s

name.

For example : Smith (2005) claims that Dubai is the

most interesting city in the world.

Here is a different situation.

If the author has written 2 or more

items in your bibliography in

the same year…

Put the letter “a” after the year for the first item, “b” for the next item

etc.

For example :(Smith, 2005a)

What if there are 2

authors ?

Write both last names with the ampersand “&”

then comma and year.

For example :(Smith & Jones,

2005)

What if the source is a website?

Again, write the author’s last name and

year.

But, if there is no author, write the first 3 words of the title of the webpage in italics

and the year.

For citations that do not seem to fit the examples, look in a book like this.

It is on the library shelf at

BF76.7 .P47 2007

Or, enter “APA” in a title or keyword

search of the library catalogue

to find similar books.

I hope this helps you understand how to write APA in-text citations for

paraphrases.

Ask your teacher or your friendly librarian

if you have any questions.